A new solo show at Ron Mandos Gallery Amsterdam.The title refers to the genre in film and books of the Scandinavian thriller or Nordic Noir. With that, she consciously gives the drawings a different charge than what can be seen at first sight…

Nature, no matter how grand and romantic, is degraded into a film set from a Netflix series such as Game of Thrones or film such as Star Wars. Which results in a substantial increase of tourism of these areas. A cruel paradox. It is a current theme that concerns her. Spoelstra: “In my heart I am a true romantic who prefers to flee into nature, but hot topics such as mass tourism (through boredom and decadence) and climate change cast a dark shadow over this urge.”

Recent works include the large-scale drawings Black Ice (2019, 200×380 cm) and Remaining Snow (2019, 200×300cm), as well as a series of Black Beaches, based on the artist’s footage of volcanic beaches. The black sand enables an estranging contrast; the dark part almost an abstract field of blackness, above it the white foam and waves as dancing ghosts, almost disappearing before your eyes.The series Northern Route consists out of seemingly random pics of Scandinavian landscape, like anyone’s slideshow after a trip. This indifference or randomness demystificates the romantic landscape, making them interchangeable with any other scene. Or maybe they are no more then ‘couleur locale’ and ‘in between shots’ of a TV series in the genre of Nordic Noir…